Everything of the Dead: the Future of Humanity is Zombie

JBeukema

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Everything of the Dead: the Future of Humanity is Zombie | h+ Magazine

(excerpts)

The iconic zombie horde isn’t just a stand-in for a terrifying undifferentiated Other, but a symbol of how we might shamble and shuffle toward liberation....

The zombie was once a servant, animated through the spiritual prowess of the vodou bokor. A zombie was someone who had wronged the community (or the bokor) and had been cast out, reduced to shambling, asocial slavery. A zombie was less than human. Romero’s vision of the zombie, the vision that has influenced popular culture for the past forty years, is a transhuman vision. And zombies continue to evolve. There are zombie banks now, institutions that are worth nothing but continue to shamble through the economy thanks to government subsidy. 28 Days Later and the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead showcased fast zombies, and zombies with a measure of intelligence and internal lives can be found in novels such as Dying to Live by Kim Paffenroth and David Wellington’s Monster series...

Back during the last Great Depression, when the Next World War was still being plotted out in the backrooms and mass-minds of Europe and Asia, anthropologist Robert Briffault wrote, “It is not a new economic system or a social order which is being forged and which menaces traditional civilization. It is a new humanity.” In a zombie apocalypse, there are only two choices. Go down fighting, and not for humanity but rather for canned goods and isolated mountain cabins. Or you can find the awe within the horror, the freedom of a sort that can only be enjoyed by former slaves, and do what George Romero once said he’d do if the zombie apocalypse came to his door: go out and get bitten.
 

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